Roosevelt (71 page)

The wheels not only of justice but also of the Roosevelt administration ground small and slow throughout 1943, to
the disbelief and despair of Jewish and other leaders. Some pleaded that the Allies negotiate directly with the Axis powers for the release of Jews, others that the Allies at least relax the blockade to allow the shipment of food and medicines to people in concentration camps and that they persuade the neutral nations to open their frontiers to escaping Jews. The administration was urged to suspend immigration quotas to quicken the flow of refugees. During early 1943 there seemed to be much action on Washington’s part, or at least motion; indeed, London and Washington competed for public recognition of their concern for the Jews. But actually the administration moved with wooden legs. At a conference on refugees held in Bermuda in April, American and British delegations agreed on a few expedients and palliatives, but the conference was debarred from pledging funds, committing ships for the transportation of refugees, or promising changes in immigration laws. Reviewing the work of the conference in early May, the President agreed to share with Britain the cost of financing the movement of specific numbers of persons and he approved the setting up in North Africa of temporary depots. But he was emphatically against trying to change immigration laws, he questioned sending large numbers of Jews to North Africa, and he opposed any sweeping promises of relief.

This wariness of the President, rather than his moral indignation, set the pattern of administration policy over the next crucial months. It took the State Department weeks to deal with issues, even to answer letters. And every week lost meant thousands of Jews and others crossed off on Hitler’s ghastly calendar of death. In August 1943 the New York
Times
published an “extermination list” detailing, country by country, the 1,700,000 persons who had died from organized murder, the 746,000 who died from starvation or disease. The nation and the administration were shocked, but not into creative action. Roosevelt was helpful in meeting specific situations and spurring emergency rescue efforts, but he seemed unable to face the main problem—the millions of Jewish men, women, and children trapped in the Nazi heartland and headed for the gas chambers.

One reason was the sheer intractability of the problem. Helping to rescue even a few thousand Jews on the rim of the Mediterranean took endless negotiation among local Jewish leaders, the State and Treasury Departments and other United States agencies, neutral nations, relief organizations, and others involved, over money, transportation, relief, housing, Moslem hostility. Getting Congress to modify the immigation laws would probably have been as difficult as Roosevelt anticipated. The fact that so many of the imperiled people abroad and the exhorting leaders at home were Jews made Roosevelt nervous about the reactions of Congress and of some
elements among the people. Nor could he, with his heavy military and diplomatic involvement in Moslem Africa, ignore the reverberations there.

But the main reason was Roosevelt’s war strategy. The only way to persuade Hitler to relinquish his grip on his victims was by bribing him or by negotiating with him, and Roosevelt flatly opposed this as violating the policy of unconditional surrender. The best way to assist the Jews and other helpless peoples, he believed, was by winning the war as quickly and decisively as possible. Alienating neutrals like Spain, diverting vital shipping from the main task of war supply, arousing false expectations and undue fears, above all, antagonizing Moslems in countries where fighting continued—all that was inconsistent with Roosevelt’s single-minded pursuit of military victory.

The same stern priority controlled Roosevelt’s approach to “Zion.” The President had long taken a cautious but benevolent view of the dream of Palestine as a Jewish homeland, though he felt that the little country was not physically suitable for resettling great numbers of Jews and he flirted with the notion of the Cameroons and later of Paraguay and still later of Portuguese West Africa—Angola—as other havens. By the end of 1942 he was again thinking about the possibilities of Palestine.

“What I think I will do,” he told Morgenthau, “is this. First, I would call Palestine a religious country. Then I would leave Jerusalem the way it is and have it run by the Orthodox Greek Catholic Church, the Protestants, and the Jews—have a joint committee run it.…I actually would put a barbed wire around Palestine.…I would provide land for the Arabs in some other part of the Middle East…. Each time we move out an Arab we would bring in another Jewish family….But I don’t want to bring in more than they can economically support…. Naturally, if there are 90 per cent Jews, the Jews would dominate the government….”

All such thoughts, however, Roosevelt subordinated to war needs, and one great war need of 1943 semed to be peace and stability in the Mid-East. Any time the President touched the issue—even by merely receiving Zionists—he triggered explosive reactions in Egypt or Syria or Saudi Arabia. During 1943 he took steps to get Jewish and Arab leaders to talk with one another, but the War Department was worried about Mid-East repercussions, and at Quebec the President and Churchill decided to postpone any further encouragement of talks between the parties. By fall of 1943 the President was leaning toward a new idea—a trusteeship for Palestine to make it into a real holy land for all three religions, with a Jew, a Christian, and a Moslem as the three trustees. Always confident of his power to persuade on a face-to-face basis, he thought that the ancient, searing
enmities of the Middle East could be overcome by negotiation and balm. Meanwhile the Nazi extermination mills ground away.

Reporters had rarely seen the President as wroth as he seemed to be at his press conference of August 21, 1943. He had been asked if he would comment on reports that Stalin had suggested a tripartite conference. No—but he had something else to say, and on the record. A columnist had committed an act of bad faith toward his country; he had damaged the unity of the United Nations and hence the war effort. “I don’t hesitate to say that the whole statement from beginning to end was a lie, but there is nothing new in it, because the man is a chronic liar in his columns.”

The reporters knew whom and what he meant: Drew Pearson had just written in “Washington Merry-Go-Round” that Cordell Hull “long has been anti-Russian” and had asserted on his radio program that Hull and his chief assistants, “Adolf Berle, Jimmy Dunn, Breckinridge Long, would really like to see Russia bled white—and the Russians know it….” Hull had shown the statements to the President, had labeled them “monstrous and diabolical falsehoods,” and had summoned the Soviet Chargé d’Affaires, Andrei A. Gromyko, to his office to repudiate them.

Observers wondered why the administration had felt stung so hard by a seeming pinprick. Pearson was not the first to accuse the administration of trying to let the Russians take the blood bath. The reaction was due mainly to Pearson’s timing. By late August 1943, just after Quebec, the President had to confront the fact that his plan for a grand concert of antifascist powers was faltering. Although war supply to Russia had risen sharply during 1943, it was
attended by numberless grievances and misunderstandings on the Soviet side, and American officials in charge of the long supply lines grumbled that the Soviets were showing little public or private recognition of American efforts. Soviet newspapers kept up a chorus of criticism of their allies’ diplomatic and military progress. And neither Churchill nor Roosevelt had yet even met with Chiang Kai-shek.

April 19,1943, Martin,
PM,
reprinted by courtesy of Field Enterprises, Inc.

In the wake of Quebec, Stalin was clearly piqued by one more Roosevelt-Churchill conference deciding matters in his absence. The situation could not be tolerated any longer, he wrote to the President and the Prime Minister late in August. “To date it has been like this: the U.S.A. and Britain reach agreement between themselves while the U.S.S.R. is informed of the agreement between the two Powers as a third party looking passively on.” Stalin was referring to negotiations with Italy, but in general he felt shut out of Anglo-American discussions. His complaint was rather baffling, since he had refused to meet with Roosevelt and Churchill earlier. Perhaps at the moment he preferred having a grievance to having a meeting—he could complain that the Russians were taking the brunt of the fighting but were treated as only a half-ally.

Most ominous of all in the fall of 1943 were scattered indications that the Soviets might be seriously considering a go-it-alone strategy. The recall of Maisky and of Litvinov had been sinister reminders of the diplomatic prelude to the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. Throughout 1943 there had been reports of peace feelers by Berlin and Moscow to each other—though on what terms and of how much seriousness were obscure. The Kremlin constantly worried that the Anglo-Americans might make a deal with a non-Hitler German government and leave Russia and Germany to a death struggle. Some Russians now seemed less concerned about the postponement of the cross-channel invasion. Alexander Korneichuk, a Foreign Vice-Commissar, said to Alexander Werth in Moscow: “Things are going so well on our front that it might even be better
not
to have the Second Front till next spring. If there were a Second Front right now, the Germans might allow Germany to be occupied by the Anglo-Americans. It would make us look pretty silly.…”

Was Moscow bluffing? Was this subtle blackmail? Or was Russia alternating between two foreign policies, coalition-co-operative and isolationist-aggressive, as conditions seemed to demand? Roosevelt and Stalin both had hard-liners to contend with. The President’s were in the administration as well as outside. Some in the Pentagon contended that the Soviets were pursuing their own interest, the only language they understood was force, and Washington should adopt a
Realpolitik,
balance-of-power strategy. William Bullitt earlier in
the year had presented to Roosevelt a reasoned, forceful argument that Russia would give no help in the defeat of Japan after the European war, and Britain very little, that Moscow would settle postwar European matters while the United States was still occupied in the Pacific, and hence that Roosevelt should either extract major concessions from Moscow and London or shift his whole strategy to beating Japan first.

Many in the party opposition still argued for Pacific First. Some Republican leaders were rumored to be in secret communication with MacArthur. Others had shifted little from their isolationist positions. Still others, however—most notably Willkie—were taking advanced positions in favor of a firm Anglo-American-Soviet partnership and of United States leadership in a strong postwar security organization. The Republicans held a well-publicized conference on Mackinac Island, in Michigan, as a prelude to platform planning for the presidential campaign of 1944. Some in the congressional party seemed as conservative as ever, but the presidential Republicans, led by Dewey, of New York, Warren, of California, and other governors took a generally internationalist position. It seemed likely that Roosevelt would have to deal with two Republican-party foreign policies, one advanced by the presidential Republicans, the other by the congressional party.

But at the darkest moment of Soviet-American relations a gleam had lighted up a great opportunity. After withdrawing his agreement to meet with Roosevelt in Fairbanks, Stalin had steadfastly refused Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s invitation to set a new time for all three to meet. He did, however, endorse the idea of a conference of foreign ministers in Moscow, and the exchanges over plans for this meeting seemed to lead naturally, though rather inexplicably, to a cautious acceptance by Stalin of a renewed invitation for a Big Three meeting. The President and the Marshal sparred at length over the place of the conference, with Roosevelt pleading that he could not fly to Teheran because he could not sign or veto congressional bills in the ten days the Constitution allowed him, and Stalin stolidly insisting on the Persian capital. Each hinted that the plan for a conference might founder if he could not get his way, but Stalin won this game of diplomatic “chicken,” and Teheran it would be.

Hull’s mission to Moscow was a useful testing of the diplomatic waters for the President and something of a triumph for the Secretary. He left Washington with enhanced prestige in the power-conscious capital, for the President had finally asked for the resignation of Sumner Welles, who had continued to vex Hull by his independent dealings with the White House and foreign envoys. Somehow the “gallant old eagle,” as Churchill later called Hull,
survived the first plane trip of his life, the tortuous discussions, and a Kremlin banquet, and he negotiated coolly, if somewhat long-windedly, with Eden and Molotov over a lengthy agenda. He found that the Russians were mainly interested in a second front and the British in political arrangements for Italy, while he pressed for a declaration of the four nations on general postwar security. He gained Molotov’s assent to the American draft; the main issue was less the content—a pledge of consultation and joint action by the big nations to maintain world law and order until a general international-security organization was established—than whether the Chinese should be included in the document and allowed to sign it, as Roosevelt and Hull keenly wished. Molotov finally agreed to this.